gathering in light

My buddy Rhett’s written on a provocative topic, what do we do about immodesty in the church? This is pressing for him and I since we are both now father’s of beautiful little girls.  He writes:

No matter what we as parents do I know there will always be that cultural peer pressure on my daughter to do something different. But in the midst of that pressure I hope that we can convey the message of the importance of modesty, and that showing skin is not what she should value or want approval from others for. Doesn’t get easier for parents when teen stars provide much of the cultural peer pressure (i.e. Hannah Montana).

Certainly both men and women are influenced by cultural expectations on how we look, what it means to be successful, what makes someone cool enough to welcome into your group, etc, but what do we do about it?  What have you done, or seen done that’s been helpful in addressing this issue for both genders? I do not think this is a female-only issue. Some church cultures have been more successful than others in promoting modesty. We do not have too much of a show of skin on Sunday mornings at our Mennonite church, but there still is still the occasion. Of course, this doesn’t address the other issues that may be bubbling under the surface in these groups either. But it is an issue that the church in general faces regularly, I remember this conversation coming up about once a semester when I was in undergrad. So, what do we do about the very basic assumptions that fuel these outward practices? [Read more]

This may be old news for some of you but last week Quaker Wendy Gonaver, an American Studies professor at Cal State Fullerton here in LA, was fired for refusing to sign the loyalty oath.

The LA Times reports:

As a Quaker from Pennsylvania and a lifelong pacifist, Gonaver objected to the California oath as an infringement of her rights of free speech and religious freedom. She offered to sign the pledge if she could attach a brief statement expressing her views, a practice allowed by other state institutions. But Cal State Fullerton rejected her statement and insisted that she sign the oath if she wanted the job.

“I wanted it on record that I am a pacifist,” said Gonaver, 38. “I was really upset. I didn’t expect to be fired. I was so shocked that I had to do this.”

(From Teacher fired for refusing to sign loyalty oath - Los Angeles Times)

This is the second time in the last year that a Quaker woman has been fired from a teaching Job in California for this reason. I personally am inspired by their witness in this situation, I can’t imagine how difficult it must be. But I have reflected on how I would like to respond if I were in their position. I certainly hope to teach someday, and I wonder if I would be able to lay my job on the line for something I too believe it. [Read more]

I’m currently writing a methods paper, laying out how I will conduct my field research among Quaker congregations. In the section where I’m dealing with culture and the role of the church I found Slavoj Žižek’s quote below to be insightful and to the point.

The social order in which religion is no longer fully integrated into and identified with a particular cultural life-form, but acquires autonomy, so that it can survive as the same religion in different cultures. This extraction enables religion to globalize itself (there are Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists everywhere today); on the other hand, the price to be paid is that religion is reduced to a secondary epiphenomenon with regard to the secular functioning of the social totality. In this new global order, religion has two possible roles: therapeutic or critical. It either helps individuals to function better in the existing order [Yoder’s Constantinianism], or it tries to asset itself as a critical agency articulating what is wrong with this order as such, a space for the voices of discontent [Sectarian Withdrawal?] - in this second case, religion as such tends toward assuming the role of a heresy.

Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 3

Barclay Press, the main Evangelical Quaker publisher, has totally revamped their website and invited five columnists to write for them over the next year. I am one of their columnists, along with Joseph Thouvenel, Pam Ferguson,  Eric Muhr, and Nancy Thomas. The new site and featured columns launched yesterday. I was really excited to receive the invitation to write for Barclay, they’ve played a big role in helping me first get published, their staff is wonderful to work with, and I really like what they’re doing their.  As a press they have a great mix of spirituality and faith in everyday life, emerging and missional church theology and Quaker books available.

A blog I read fairly often has been posting quotes from Yoder’s essay on tradition, they’re worth sharing here, plus you might as well check out INHABITATIO DEI.

“We are not talking about ‘the authority of tradition’ as if tradition were a settled reality and we were then to figure out how it works. We are asking how, within the maelstrom of the traditioning process, we can keep our bearings and distinguish between the way the stream should be going and side channels that eddy but lead nowhere. Can we do this by some criterion beyond ourselves? The peculiarity of the term ‘tradition’ is that it points to that criterion beyond itself to which it claims to be a witness. We are therefore doing no violence to the claim of tradition when we test it by its fidelity to that origin. A witness is not being dishonored when we test his fidelity as an interpreter of the events to which he testifies. That is his dignity as witness; he wants to be tested for that.”

–John Howard Yoder, “The Authority of Tradition”, in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame: UNDP, 1984), 77-78. From here.

[Read more]

 This past weekend I was in Greensboro, North Carolina, at a Quakers United in Publication (QUIP) conference. There was a really great group of people there, writers, publishers, editors, bloggers, you name it, if they’re interested in publishing and they’re Quaker there’s a good chance they were there (or should have been!). I was one of the people accepted to the editorial board for the second Quaker Young Adult book, an edited volume of essays and artwork projected to come out in 2010. The weekend was spent doing a panel for the rest of the QUIP members and then collaborating with my fellow editors on a call for submissions for the book, as well as some basic overall structure for the project, etc. [Read more]

I’ve been using the GTD system since I first setup my Moleskine GTD for students and am getting a decent amount out of it. But I’ve struggled with finding ways to keep things straight with all the information flying at me on my mac. I’ve been working on using five separate DevonThink databases for all my research and work, these separate databases have really helped me keep things focused (they are home, academics, teaching, projects, and field research). But the more projects I begin work on, the more things there are to keep track of that fall outside the powers of DT. The trouble for me is keeping everything else straight, todo’s, dates, random notes, emails, etc. I’ve tried the various GTD programs put out by Apple developers but I’m not about to dish out $40 for a program that helps me “get things done.” I found a delightful and simple solution the other day when I stumbled across Dennis Best’s post “Getting things done (simply) in Leopard.” It’s really great, really simple, and uses all the apps that are pre-installed on your mac, apps that you’re most likely using anyways. He walks through how to setup Apple Mail and iCal for GTD and offers a few great scripts for those of us who needs things put in laymen’s terms (that’s me). Anyways, check the post out, maybe it will help, and save you a few bucks. [Read more]

Fuller Theological Seminary President Richard Mouw was invited to be a part of a roundtable of thinkers commenting on the Pope’s recent visit to the US for the New York Times.

But the attraction of a pope-in-a-stadium has its own unique meaning, I think. In a “post-modern” age Benedict represents something that is decidedly pre-modern. He comes to America as one who knows how to walk ancient paths. He models a chastity that stands in sharp contrast to the easy promiscuity of our culture. Yet he is conversant with our present-day patterns of thought. He brings much learning to what he has to say to us.

From Richard Mouw’s Stadium Religion

You can read his three posts here:

•  I really liked his thoughts on Evangelicals and Catholics in Dialogue: Why the Pope Speaks for Evangelicals, Too
• On Faith and Human Rights
• Stadium Religion